Issue #4 : We Don't Have Dancing Robots

Friday, March 9th, 2012

Alright PyCon is happening right now; If you are there be sure to tell two people about pycoders or we might get the dancing robots to turn on you. If not then you can join us in our jealously! We do have some good news though, you are about to filled in on this week's happenings. Some pretty cool projects were announced this week including Shovel (Rake for python), and much, much more.

Mezzanine 1.0 ReleasedDjango powered CMS Mezzanine reaches version 1.0. Mezzanine is a very full featured and mature Django based CMS project that powers plenty of websites. With the use of Cartridge you can also use Mezzanine as a ecommerce platform. This is very cool and worth checking out. Visit the Mezzanine site.

Previous PyCon Videos (2009-2011)This week is PyCon, so check out some video from previous PyCons to see what you are missing. If you aren’t missing PyCon, we are jealous.

ShovelRake for python. Turn python functions into tasks simply, and access and invoke them from the command line. Recently added functionality to trigger these tasks through the browser, for increased laziness. Enjoy.

CycloneLow level network toolkit, which provides support for HTTP 1.1 in an API very similar to the one implemented by the Tornado web server, but it’s based on twisted bringing two worlds together. For increased performance so they claim and greatly ease of use.

Siri Server CorePure python implementation of a Siri server, not a proxy. Unfortunately only 4S version’s of the iPhone can communicate with the Apple servers. This server tries to recreate this server leveraging Google Speech-To-Text API.

BrowserRefresh-SublimeAfter installing this plugin you can hit ‘command + shift + r’ on any window in Sublime Text 2 and your Google Chrome window will come to the foreground and reload the active tab. If the current file is unsaved, it will be saved before Chrome is activated and reloaded. Awesome!

Articles.

A review of Django's new password authenticationA brief overview of Django’s new password hashing abilities in Django 1.4, with some interesting commentary on the the difference between the public and private(source code) documentation about the default hashing algorithm used in 1.4.

Django Settings for Production and Development: Best PracticesDjango settings are a tough one, everyone seems to have a different way to do it and they all have their own benefits and tradeoffs. In this article the author outlines 3 different ways to have environment specific settings for your different environments, he also lists plenty of sources that are useful to read when trying to make your decision. This is worth checking out, even if you already do this in one way, its always useful to see different perspectives on solving the same problem.

A Python reading listThis is a good list of books for a python developer looks to expand his or her knowledge as well as a list for kids and the complete novice python developer who is just starting out. This is a fairly complete list and I would definitely recommend taking a look at the list. The only real glaring omission I see in the list is Expert Python Programming which is a pretty fantastic book focused on best practices, optimizations, managing code and some different programming paradigms.

A parallel pip demoThis is a pretty neat proof of concept. It is a parallel install script for pip which uses gevent to download and install pip packages in parallel. This is interesting and we would love to see something like this implemented in pip proper because it would make repeated deployments with many dependencies much quicker.

Using Fuzzy Matching to Search by Sound with PythonIn this article Doug Hellmann describes various approaches and algorithms that can be used to solve the problem of search for similar sounding words in a database of words. The article has some sample code as well, so you can hit the ground running if you wanted to try this out.

Evolution of a Python programmerYou probably wont see too many humorous posts in this newsletter but this has been popping up periodically over the last few years and is really pretty funny and interesting so we think its worth checking out.

How Python 3 Should Have WorkedAaron Shwartz co-founder of Reddit and original author of web.py has some interesting thoughts on how the Python 3 roll out should be happening. His main point is that transitioning to Python 3 should have worked in much the same way that transitioning Python 2.x versions worked, and to get Python 3 support in files you could just do “from __future__ import python3”. We don’t think this will change anything, but definitely worth reading.